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Steamed Pudding
One cup graham flour, one-half cup raisins, scant cup of molasses, one cup of milk, one teaspoon each of cinnamon and cloves, one teaspoon of baking soda dissolved in hot water. Steam three hours. Serve either with hot or cold sauce.
A plain molasses-and-graham steamed pudding of the sort that needed nothing but a kettle and a covered mold. The instructions assume knowledge the modern cook may not have: how full to fill the mold, how to keep the water going, and what sauce was meant.
- Graham flourSylvester Graham's coarse, unsifted whole wheat. Stone-ground whole wheat flour is the closest current equivalent; ordinary whole wheat works but gives a finer, denser crumb.
- MolassesA "scant cup" means just under a cup, deliberately short. Use unsulphured light or dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter and will overwhelm the spice.
- The sodaA full teaspoon reads high, but molasses is acidic and this batter has no other leavening. The recipe directs that it be dissolved in hot water; a little hot water disperses it evenly, where soda dumped in dry leaves soapy pockets.
- SaltNone is called for. A quarter teaspoon makes a real difference to the spice.
- The moldGrease a 1- to 1 1/2-quart pudding mold, coffee tin or heatproof bowl and fill it no more than two-thirds. Cover tightly with a lid or foil tied down, or steam escapes and the top turns to paste.
- Steaming setupStand the mold on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water reaching halfway up its sides, lid on, water at a bare simmer. Check the level every 45 minutes and top up with boiling water.
- Three hoursThe timing suits a large mold; in a smaller 1-quart mold over a steady simmer it may well be done sooner, so start testing early. A skewer into the center should come out clean and the top should spring back.
- Sauce"Hot or cold sauce" is unspecified; the usual candidates would be a hot lemon or vanilla cornstarch sauce, or a cold hard sauce of creamed butter and confectioners' sugar with a little vanilla or brandy.
- YieldRoughly four to six modest servings. It slices best after a short rest out of the mold, and reheats well by steaming again for about 20 minutes.
Steamed puddings survived in American cookery long after the open-hearth era because they asked nothing of the oven: a covered mold in a kettle of simmering water cooked reliably on a wood or coal range whose oven heat was hard to hold steady. The graham flour here points to the mid-century reform enthusiasm for Sylvester Graham's unbolted wheat, which had by this time settled into ordinary domestic use as simply a coarser, cheaper, more filling flour. Molasses did the sweetening because it was the cheap sweetener, and the heavy hand with cinnamon and cloves is characteristic of the whole family of boiled and steamed puddings descended from English plum and suet puddings -- minus the suet, the eggs and the brandy, which is what makes this an everyday receipt rather than a holiday one.